052 Building Authority With Your Audience

As part of our regular Money Monday episodes, The “core concepts” series will introduce each of the fundamental pieces of the online business puzzle. With a focus on business elements that apply to any online business. Regardless of your niche, we want to provide incredible value in helping bloggers and business start ups get the best possible start and advantage for their online career.

As well as regularly focusing on universal online business concepts, the other key change is the episode show notes.

We are creating show notes that actually explain in detail the concepts we talk about in the podcast. We also aim to offer some useful PDF downloads that will help you action the concepts included in these episodes.

The Usual link / mentions from the show are at bottom of the show notes.

Episode 052 Summary:

Do readers take your blog seriously? If they don’t, sales are almost impossible to make. We discuss the why and how of Authority and we talk in depth about step one (of many!) towards authority: Self Hosting.

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In this episode of the Travel Freedom Podcast we talk about Authority

What is authority?

This is probably a bit obvious to most of you but in context of a blog it’s good to understand specifically what we are talking about.

Authority is about creating a position of trust and knowledge towards your readers – or listeners. When you write or speak about a topic, you need to convey your authority or no one is going to take you seriously.

Part one of gaining authority is genuinely knowing your topic. Demonstrating why your opinion counts is what is going to win readers. Think about how you back up your opinions. How do you establish yourself quickly as an authority on the topic so that new readers will take your position seriously?

But, simply knowing your topic is not the whole picture. Everything you do on your site can subtly add to your authority

Does your site look professional?

Is it hosted professionally?

The language you use

The style

The offers you make and the way you make them

Why do you need Authority?

Having a position of authority gives you the trust of your readers. Having trust means having influence. And influence means what you say matters.

If what you say matters, companies will want to work with you. Readers will want to come back for more. Visitors will become customers.

Once you have that authority, money can flow in your direction as can respect and success.

With zero authority, who is going to buy your stuff? You can make as many propositions as you want. Offer multiple products. But, without authority, you will never get acknowledged and you’ll find it hard to make sales.

How do you get Authority?

There is no quick answer to this. In fact, building authority is what everyone of the episodes / articles from our new “core concept series” are going to be about.

Authority is the complete package:

Putting the time in to get respect from your peers.

Building a reputation for consistency and quality.

Really understanding the niche you are in

Being a confident and accurate conveyor of content.

Branding your company clearly.

Presenting that branding coherently across everything you work on.

Knowing your message, your position and sticking to it.

Grabbing attention and keeping it.

We hope to cover these topics and many more as we go through this series.

Today, step one is about presenting your site as professional. And, online, this means having a blog or website that says “Authority”.

How your site achieves this will be down to your brand, something we’ll talk about in another episode.

But there is a common, fundamental thread that connects almost all successful sites:

Self Hosting

What is self hosting?

You buy a piece of internet real-estate where your blog content can be stored and served to visitors. Effectively, it’s a space on a server in a data centre somewhere. But it means you own that space.

Why Self hosting

If you are hosted on a blog site (like blogger.com or blogspot) not only do you look like a “hobby” blog, because you are part of their platform but you rely on them to run your site. If they make changes to how the site works, you have no say in that.

With Self hosting, you have 100% control over how your site functions. You can install and change whatever you like. This is the pro option that says to customer and other companies that you are serious about your business and blog.

The best option for self hosting for startups

We’ve been with Bluehost since mid 2014 – after migrating from a far inferior host. For only $3.95 a month, our server handles our 100,000 page views across the 5 different sites we run at this time. This is way more load than a shared host would normally take. We have a lot of optimisation in place to minimise this load.

One such method, that is included with the Bluehost shared hosting is a “CDN” or Content Delivery Network. This hosts your photos on a separate server from the rest of your blog. Meaning less strain on the main server. We have a number of other methods, which we talk about in this 052 podcast episode – so take a listen above.

We cannot promise that if you have 100,000 page views a month that Bluehost will handle your site as well as it has for us. Suffice to say, we’ve been really impressed with them. For new startups, shared hosting is by far the most cost effective and convenient option. When your business grows you can afford to expand.

Fortunately, Bluehost offers a pro-rata rebate if you leave before the end of you plan (Always check the Ts & Cs to be sure though). So if you move or upgrade early, you can claim some of the money back.

When we signed up with blue host, we got our domain name for free for the first 12 months too. One less thing to set up and pay for! Plus, they have a one-click install process for wordpress, so you can get it all set up in seconds and save all that hassle installing it manually.

If you’d like to get the discounted price of $3.95 per month you can use our link: BLUEHOST.

The longer your sign up period, the better the price. $3.95 is the cheapest option and the one we signed up to last year.

How to manage content on your self hosted site:

WordPress.

You’ve probably heard of WordPress. Consider it the Filing cabinet and user interface for your blog. It organises all your articles and photos and stores them on your host server. You can create articles easily using there simple to learn dashboard.

Although there are other content management systems available, WordPress is super-functional and free. With hoards of plugins and other useful options available, it’s a no brainer.

If you sign up with Bluehost, as I mentioned above, wordpress is a one click install. Otherwise you can download it from the WordPress site and install it manually (they have instructions on how to do this, though it may take an hour or so to get it right your first time)

The WordPress self hosting software is not to be confused with the WordPress hosted blogs – where your blog is actually stored on WordPress, not on your own host.

CloudFlare CDN – provides a content delivery network and distributed domain name server services, sitting between the visitor and the CloudFlare user’s hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites.

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DISCLAIMER: We are affiliated with, World nomads, Optimizepress, Theme Forest and Bluehost – companies we love and support. Some other links may also be affiliate link – these links help support the podcast financially. All our opinions, as always, are our own.